Category: GOP

Baseball Crank Reminds Us Why Guys Like Mitt Romney Treat Bloggers With The Affection Afforded A Wild Pitch

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by Smitty

You’re Mitt Romney. You’ve been running for POTUS for over half a decade now. And here is this anonymous blogger named Baseball Crank kicking north of 3,200 words worth of sand on your shoes while you’re up to bat. On top of that, he links ~15k of words from 2007 about why you were inferior to Senator John McCain even then.

Who is this anonymous guy? Where does he get off saying things like (emphasis mine):

A second problem I have with Romney, and which worries me greatly if he wins, is that he is precisely the kind of candidate that political consultants, campaign professionals and the campaign committees in the GOP love, and who lead us over and over again to defeat.
(Side note: if Romney’s the nominee, I will fight for him to win, because the stakes are too high to roll over and accept an Obama re-election. But that doesn’t mean I need to be blind to the costs of Romney winning).
Political consultants love candidates who enter races with a lot of money and not much in the way of a political record or political convictions. Such candidates can be tailored to a script and platform developed by the consultants, they spend money on the consultants and their businesses, and when the candidate inevitably fails because he or she lacks the natural political instincts and convictions to speak well off script, the consultant can just shrug, say there’s only so much you can do with a bad candidate, and move on to the next one. Over and over, Republicans have lost races with such people, and if Romney manages to back his way into a victory this fall, we shall never be rid of them.
We all know, whether or not we admit it, that Romney (who has heavily outspent his rivals in negative advertising in his key victories in Florida and Michigan) would not be the frontrunner in this race if he didn’t have the most money.

Oh, come on, BC! You know that guys in the Romney league buy the passion like they buy the votes. We’re talking about a league where it’s not about a paycheck or bills anymore. Money is just an abstraction; the game score on the X-Box of life. The money is just a distractor. What about the time spent building the team, the organization in all 57 states?

What a sad development, to have carefully sculpted such a fine traditional media image, from the Bruce Campbell good looks, to the poster-child children, to the gorgeous wife, to the speech tones so fine that they are measured with calipers in rehearsal, and then get trashed by some anonymous blogger.

You expect SNL to do something sophomoric, like a cold open with Sheppard “Norman Bates” Smith:

How do you respond to this sort of factual assault from a blogger? *sigh*

Bonus Bill Hader as James Carville having waaaaay too much fun (caution, this is PG-13 humor):

GOP Debate, Arguably, Still Going Strong

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by Smitty

I met young Ben Shapiro at the blogger awards event Friday morning at CPAC. Crowder was making a running joke on the topic of condoms and a social conservative Presidential candidate. After two or three tries that fell flat, I looked at Shapiro and said “He’s going to keep inflating that joke until it pops.”

Is the last pre-Super Tuesday GOP debate on 01 March in some way similar to a Steven Crowder condom joke? I contend that the topic of the debate informs the question. Sample debate topics for which total collapse of the debate itself is appropriate:

  • The economy.
  • Every good thing President Obama ever did.
  • U.S. credibility in Southwest Asia.
  • The Constitutional basis for Progressivism.
  • What the Left knows about free market capitalism.
  • Courageous bureaucratic acts.

So, no hint as to what the candidates were to have discussed at the onset of March Madness. However, given the relative lack of substantive policy debate in the preceding events, it’s hard to argue that a collapse on 01 March is any worse than what came before.

In fact, it is arguably more honest that that candidates not bother wasting our time, again, rather than stand there for 1-2 hours saying nothing to each other in the most caustic political terms available.

Good news, bad news: who can say?

Is It Really Just Mitt, Or Is The Entire GOP Necropolis Facing Rejection?

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by Smitty

Byron York in The Examiner is worth a full read:

Romney stages perfect events. For example, on the eve of the primary, Romney’s rally in North Charleston was perfect from a production point of view: stage just right, big flags, big Romney signs, smooth introductions from South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, all topped off by a showy entrance by Romney, who arrived in his big campaign bus that drove right into the room.
It was perfect in every sense but engaging with the voters. Romney’s stump speech was a clipped — some would say dumbed down — list of generalities, concluding with this: “I love this land, I love its Constitution, I revere its founders, I will restore those principles, I will get America back to work, and I’ll make sure that we remain the shining city on the hill.” Romney offered his supporters very little to chew on. In this primary race, voters are hungry for substance, and Romney didn’t give them much.

So, the media and GOP-elite anointed candidate is 1 for 3, and the media darling, Huntsman, is long gone. Sure, the Tea Party favorites like Bachmann, Perry and Cain are also extinguished, but what does that 1 for 3 record say for all of the Really Smart Guys of the Rove set?

I submit that maybe it isn’t just Mitt getting the Trump treatment here. Rather, faced with an informed set of voters, it’s the entire GOP elite that is looking as chumpy as BHO. It’s not just Romney looking a teeny bit cannibalistic over the ‘shining city’ phrase. This GOP had better wake up and join the Tea Party, STAT.

via Riehl World View

Meanwhile, over at Power Line, Scott Johnson doesn’t see the positives:

As of this morning, Romney’s campaign is reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign. She had the air of inevitability and the financial wherewithal for a long national campaign. By contrast with Newt, however, Obama also had an excellent campaign team with a superior strategic vision of the way through the nominating process. I find it hard to believe that Newt can improvise his way to the nomination. But to quote Mitt this past Thursday: “Maybe!”
Romney has been helped along so far by the division of the conservative Republican vote among the various conservative non-Romneys in the race. Santorum will persist, but conservatives harboring the non-Romney animus will coalesce around Newt. To the extent that Newt has now emerged as the conservative alternative to Mitt, Mitt has a serious race on his hands; we have a race on our hands.
What now? Newt seems to me an implausible presidential candidate. I thought he had exhausted his political capital among conservatives in a remarkably short period of time more than a decade ago. I was wrong. He is not a popular guy among the American people, who already have a strong impression of him. Americans view him even less favorably than they do Obama. I understand the result last night, but it’s hard for me to see how this story has a happy ending — for us, if not for Newt.

Of the four GOP men standing, three of them have variously reached out to the Tea Parties. Paul has always postured himself as the fiscal responsibility outsider, Santorum is the everyman who does his own taxes and can’t afford a full sweater, and Newt is the master of forgotten history.

So instead of bemoaning the death of The Ruling Class, country club GOP knobs represented by Mitt, let’s just admit they are done, cut off the rot, and have the GOP continue to re-connect with America.

I don’t grasp why this is so hard, other than forcing the Karl Roves of the world to wash their hands a bit more, but it can be done.

Update: Dondero at Libertarian Republican serves up the Mitt aftershock:What else would we expect Romney to say, exactly? “I went down to the pet store, got a small animal, and killed it with my bare hands in frustration.”

Update II: Legal Insurrection:

the hyperbole being expressed by Romney supporters in the media and inside the party has crossed over from argument to fearmongering.

Or is it the death wail of the GOP elite?

Update III: linked at Daily Pundit:

Would we had more intelligent men who can talk about and explain that history in clear, concise, compelling terms, and thereby bring the torch of liberty lit by our Founders and Framers in long-forgotten eras and places to a new set of hands better able to hold it aloft than the faltering claws of the anti-American gang currently waging war on every aspect of America.
Yes, America, ask what your birthright really is, what it truly means to be an American what sort of sacrifices were made by those who came before you to ensure that being an American has always meant you were better than any other nation of people ever to walk the face of this planet.

Our candidates have ultimately been a mirror of our own failings.

As I’ve admitted already, I did little more than vote, in my rational ignorance, until around January 2008, when Liberal Fascism went off with all the subtlety of a grenade.

Dear Jonah Goldberg: What?

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by Smitty

Jonah Goldberg has an excellent column in the LA Times, but throws this in:

Frankly, I can’t blame anyone for being underwhelmed by Romney, or begrudge anyone their frustration with the field. What’s harder to understand is how nobody has noticed that the conservative establishment, which includes many of my friends denouncing it, has become vastly more conservative over the last two decades. It’s more pro-life, more pro-2nd Amendment, more opposed to tax increases.

I guess my take on the nature of conservativism begins with the Founding Fathers, who seemed rather libertarian in outlook. Maybe if the technology had existed 240 years ago to pull stunts like the TSA, the Founders would have done it.

But I doubt it. Would the Founders have bought into central banking and social security? Maybe, maybe not, and counterfactuals are distraction, in any case.

So, if ‘becoming vastly more conservative’ means you can now slide a piece of paper between the Democrat and Republican parties, fine. I’ll buy it. But the GOP has a great deal of atonement to accomplish, and the VA primary fracas, hopefully, is not a general indicator of the willingness to repent of the GOP’s statist, anti-American leanings.

via McEnroe

Category: GOP

Tea Party vs. GOP

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by Smitty

I find myself mostly agreeing with this analysis in Canada Free Press:

The Tea Party is like a young boxer with great skills and a knockout punch, but with skinny legs: a seemingly unstoppable force in the early rounds, if a wily opponent can just survive his initial dynamism, it will be possible to get the better of him in the late rounds, as his tired legs force him to stand flat-footed more often, thus exposing himself to attack.
In the case of the Tea Party, the wily opponent is the Republican Establishment itself; the main event is the presidential primaries. Consider this year’s candidates. Everyone can name the ones who were actively involved in the Tea Party, who attended Tea Party events, and proclaimed their principled alignment with the movement even before the 2010 elections. And everyone knows that the Tea Party is the movement that single-handedly made 2010 possible, leading the charge for radical realignment of congressional priorities, and dragging dozens of hopelessly milquetoast Republican candidates along in its jet stream.
And yet, barely a week away from the Iowa Caucus, the official story of the campaign is that the frontrunners are Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, the only two candidates in this race (Jon Huntsman aside) who can be called big government Republicans, and the only ones whom no one could call Tea Party Republicans. (Aside from Gingrich himself, of course, whose history shows that he will proudly call himself whatever the crosswinds of the moment seem to be whistling.) The only other candidate getting any attention from the mainstream attention-providers, at this pivotal stage of the process, is Ron Paul, who, like Donald Trump before him, is primarily a convenient straw man for the anti-Tea Party forces. “See,” they say, “the Tea Party is represented by kooks and ignorant blusterers; so it’s time to get back to the serious Republicans, Romney and Gingrich.”

Just to pick up the other end of the argument, you can’t overturn 157 years of GOP development in just a year or two. The two keys in political struggles are (a) showing up, and (b) having the stamina to figure out the rules and remain in the game.

If you’re the GOP, and you think back to Ross Perot, you figure that if you wait long enough, this Constitutional hot flash will subside, and people will go back to doing what they are told. And they would be getting away with it, too, if not for these meddling bloggers.

via Northern Virginia Tea Party

Rush Nails It On The Craven GOP

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by Smitty

Rush Limbaugh went ballistic about both the Obama 06Dec speech, and the corresponding spinelessness of the GOP in refusing to attack #OccupyResoluteDesk. Of local note is the Timmy Kaine run for Senate.

Face it: rather than gearing up for the next concession speech in 2012, the GOP needs to take this class warfare speech of Baracks and parse it, break it down, and fire it right back at Barack, word for word.

Don’t back down, double down. The country is at stake. Let’s find out who the little children are at GOP HQ and gently toss them in the broom closet until after the election next November. ‘Not going after Barack’ was John McCain’s path to victoryconcession speech in 2008; fear of a reprise in 2012 is exactly why no one wants Mitt on the ticket. Let’s put on our big boy pants now, GOP, and git ‘er done. But even if Mitt simulates gumption, is there any way he can convince conservatives that he isn’t a method actor in a bureaucracy play?

Fischersville Mike with the pithy observation:

Blue Virginia seems awfully excited by Barack Obama giving a speech where Teddy Roosevelt talked in 1910.
Roosevelt was the former president in 1910.
Obama will be a former president in 14 months.

Pithier still, the IowaHawk, via LI

via Atlas Shrugs